In the past and in present practice, ice sculptures have been made by carving shapes from blocks of ice. This is a very tedious, uncomfortable and time-consuming skilled process. The resulting ice sculptures are often very expensive and therefor appeal to a relatively small market.
In order to provide affordable ice sculptures, molds have been made. These are typically top-open molds that can be filled with water and frozen. After freezing, the mold is removed, leaving a shaped sculpture for use or for minor finishing touches by the ice sculptor.
While the above mold concept is effective for producing ice forms at reasonable cost, the quality of the sculpture is almost always poor. This is most often due to air bubbles that form in the sculpture as the water freezes. The result is that the sculpture has a cloudy appearance that is unappealing and distracts from the sculptural form.
Quality hand carved ice sculpture is made from clear ice blocks. Such blocks can be made by using professional ice block forming machinery that include special provisions for circulating water during the freezing process to remove impurities which cause cloudiness. However, such machinery is quite expensive and cannot affordably be made with tanks shaped like individual sculpture designs. Instead a rectangular block is formed and the sculpture must be carved. Until advent of the present invention there has not been a mold, process or system known to the present inventors that will enable production of quality, visually clear ice sculptures using a mold.
Attempts have been made to produce ice sculptures from molds, but all such attempts known to the present inventors have failed to produce quality visually clear ice sculptures. In one attempt, illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 2,545,592 to Sherbloom, air is pumped into a water filled mold submerged in a brine or water solution. It was believed that the air would influence water circulation in the mold and that impurities would migrate to the center of the mold. The impurities could then be removed by suction and fresh water could be added. While this process may have functioned to produce a structurally better sculpture due to immersion of the mold, the cloudy ice issue remained. There was no disclosure in Sherbloom of how the impurities could have been removed from the mold, nor is there any indication that air bubbles are eliminated. Quite to the contrary, the pressurized air jets would quite likely contribute to formation of air bubbles in the sculpture.
Other attempts made to provide ice sculpture molds have focused not on the problem of removing cloudiness, but in allowing for expansion of the ice as it forms to thereby avoid cracks. This problem is allegedly solved by providing molds with expansion capability so the mold sections will move or expand as the water inside freezes. While such units might function to avoid cracks, the possibility for entrained air bubbles and impurities to remain in the finished sculpture remains.
A need has thus remained for good quality mold formed ice sculptures that are at least substantially free of impurities and extremely clear in appearance, with no special skills required to produce quality artistic products.
An objective of the present invention is therefor to substantially eliminate all cloudiness in mold formed ice sculptures by circulating water through the mold during ice formation.
The above and further objects and advantages will become evident from the following description which, in combination with the accompanying drawings and claims, sets forth the best mode presently contemplated for carrying out the present invention.